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But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian
transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its
interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while
Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.

—The New York Times

America wakes up to astonishing bullshit from its so-called Newspaper
of Record in this
lead front-page propaganda dump du jour. Granted, American education has
succeeded in destroying the critical faculties of at least three generations
so that the public drowns in a soup of unreality every day. In the news
business now, as in the national life generally, anything goes and nothing
matters.

One has to wonder, though, about the editors who serve up this baloney.
Are they mere servelings of the Rand Corporation, Raytheon, and other parties
with an interest in the war business, or can they possibly believe their own
extrusions of fabricated agit-prop?

For instance, the imputed Russian “annexation of Crimea,” as if the place
was some kind of nostalgic, sore-beset Ruritania of independent princes,
colorful peasants, and earnest postal clerks cruelly enslaved by bloodthirsty
Cossacks. No, Crimea had been officially a province of Russia since exactly
1783 — which was, by the way, the same year that the American Revolution
officially ended via the Treaty of Paris.

After the Russian Revolution (1917) the Crimean peninsula became an
autonomous province of the Soviet Union, meaning it remained a part of what
was then Russia. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev turned the administrative duties
over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was then also a
province of the greater USSR, i.e. Russia. Through the entire modern era,
Crimea has been the site of the USSR’s, and now Russia’s, only warm-water
naval bases. Ask the average American college student why that is, and you
will surely receive a blank stare.

Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea, which connects to the
Mediterranean Sea. Hence Crimea’s strategic value. For a few short years in
the 21st century, following the breakup of the USSR, the
now-independent Ukraine had possession of Crimea and essentially rented the
existing naval bases to Russia. That provided a much needed revenue stream
for the struggling country, which was also utterly dependent on imported
Russian natural gas supplies, which Ukraine had to pay for.

When the elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was overthrown
in 2014, with the help of the US State Department and CIA, Russia was obliged
to secure its naval bases in Crimea — where the overwhelming majority of
citizens were culturally and linguistically Russian anyway. A referendum
ratified the transfer of Crimea back to Russia. Apart from these procedural
details, it must be obvious that Russia would never have ceded its strategic
naval bases on the Black Sea to Ukraine, especially when that beleaguered
country was being manipulated by the USA and NATO into becoming an
adversarial presence on Russia’s border.

At the same time, the US and NATO have been running war games near
Russia’s border in the Baltic region and American soldiers have been deployed
into Lithuania. What war are they preparing for exactly? What is supposedly
at issue (besides America’s apparent lust for war)?

That last question applies equally to the incessantly repeated trope that
Russia interfered in the 2016 US election. What is supposedly at issue? The
New York Times has been making this empty allegation for a year now,
without every specifying exactly how Russia might have “interfered.” In the
process, the newspaper has squandered its credibility on what looks exactly
like a witch hunt — a campaign against dark and mysterious supernatural
forces. It is doing great harm to an already badly-educated, misinformed,
economically distressed, drug-addled American public. It also looks like
plain old war-mongering.

Coverage of the Trump-Putin meeting during the G-20 conference this week
is being played like a WWF championship bout. Which president is weak or
strong? Which one will be a loser of a winner? This is no way to cover
geopolitical relations. The United States and its news media look like they
want this country to commit suicide by stupidity.

James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine.
In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.